This document outlines the use of the NetQuarry Enterprise Application Platform to rapidly build a web application to manage the medical meeting (“Trade Showâ€) process for Mission Pharmacal. Mission Pharmacal (http://www.missionpharmacal.com) is a privately held pharmaceutical manufacturer headquartered in San Antonio, Texas.
Mission Pharmacal has representatives that attend approximately 100 “medical meetings†a year on behalf of the company. A medical meeting is effectively a trade show where Mission displays, explains, and generates leads on their pharmaceutical products. During the course of a meeting, attendees of the meeting can register at the mission display (booth) to request more information. This data (attendee demographics), is sent to Mission post-meeting in a somewhat standardized format.
Original Process
The original process involved a manual import of the post-meeting data into a Microsoft Excel format. Next, a mail merge was used to generate mailing labels for each of the attendees. The labels were affixed to a thank you letter that included a response card that the attendee could send
back to request samples or more information. When the response card was returned, a separate Mission employee would manually key the responses, including all demographic information, into a Microsoft Access Database. Periodically, the names and their responses from the
response card were exported and printed in a tabular format. This final report was then sent to the customer service department for order fulfillment.
There were several problems with this process. First, it was extremely time consuming and error prone, requiring interaction with at least 3 different applications to manage a single meeting. Second, there was no way to track the fact that attendees can and do attend multiple meetings, which meant that Mission was unable to capitalize on this information. Finally, the process of matching an attendee to an assigned account required a looking into Mission’s SFA system, a step that was impossible due to access and license issues.
Problems Solved
The new software consolidates all of the original processes into a single web interface. From one application, one can enter information about the meeting, import attendees, export labels, manage response cards, and export fulfillment information for customer service. In addition,
the attendees are matched against the Mission Sales Force Automation system and notification is sent to the correct sales representatives of the fact that one of their accounts (called “professionalsâ€) has attended the meeting.
How it was done
Using the NetQuarry platform and one developer, a complete, enterprise-class application was delivered to Mission in a remarkably short amount of time.
The entire process from initial discussions and analysis to running implementation took place in two and one-half days. Of this time, approximately one day was spent on analysis of the problem and existing systems (the SFA system) and one-half day was spent dealing with deployment and testing on Mission’s server.
The application includes rich import and export facilities, manages more than a dozen functionally rich web-based forms, and provides Mission
with a single application to manage all of their medical meetings. Again, all completed in less than three days.
The key to this success was the NetQuarry platform. Using the NetQuarry Studio, a single developer produced a complete application in less than three days.
About NetQuarry
NetQuarry is the Enterprise Application Platform for Microsoft .NET.
The platform is comprised of pre-built software, metadata and tools designed to help professional software teams develop significantly
better enterprise and hosted business applications. Developers using NetQuarry will deliver everything faster (less time and manpower equals less cost):
- Rapid Prototypes (in as little as one day)
- Functional applications that perform like highly mature ISV solutions
- Continuous, quality improvements and iterations
- Agile response to the reality of changing requirements
The NetQuarry platform is not a code generator. Rather, it is a declarative framework that provides a foundation of deep functionality common to all enterprise and hosted applications, including data binding, database virtualization, OS-virtualization, searching, filtering, user interface, and role-based security.
Today’s dynamic business environments demand a great deal from developers and their managers. Rapid, agile, iterative development allows developers to incorporate frequent feedback from end users, realizing that successful applications are constantly refined, changing rapidly to meet the needs of the enterprise.
Making agile development successful requires advanced software infrastructure and disciplined methodologies. Infrastructure should be
designed to facilitate iterative development, producing quality applications.
Our Value Proposition is simple: Higher quality business applications delivered in a fraction of the time.
For more information, visit www.netquarry.com or contact us via email: info@netquarry.com.